Snowbound Bride-to-Be

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And even if he wasn’t, the baby had to eat something out of one of those little jars of mash he carried with him.

His initial relief that the kitchen was an oasis of “not decorated” evaporated. The smells were intense in this room, as was the atmosphere of country cheer and charm: sunshine-yellow walls, white cabinets, old gray linoleum floors polished to high gloss. But, like the door handle falling off, he could see hints of problems, frost on the inside of the windows, a tap dripping.

A huge plank harvest table dominated the room and was covered in platters and platters of cookies.

On a closer look, there were cookies shaped like trees, and cookies frosted in pink, Santa cookies, and chocolate-dipped cookies, gingerbread men and gingerbread houses.

“You weren’t kidding that you were expecting guests,” he said. “How many?”

“I was hoping for a hundred.”

He shot her a wary look at the disappointment in her voice. “You were expecting a hundred people here tonight?”

“The opening night of Holiday Happenings,” she said, and he did his best to remain expressionless at how horrifying he found that name. She took his silence, unfortunately, as an invitation to go on, even though her voice had begun to wobble.

“There’s a pond out back. There was going to be skating. And bonfires. A neighbor was going to bring his team of horses. Clydesdales.” Something was shining behind her eyes.

He thought, again, of the kind of women he had once dated. Five-star meals, gifts of diamonds, evenings that ended in hot tubs. Not Holiday Happenings kind of women.

Emma’s disappointment was palpable. He hoped, uneasily and fervently, she wasn’t going to cry. Nothing felt like a threat to him as much as a woman’s tears. Tess already knew, and used it to her advantage at every opportunity.

“Sorry,” he said, gruffly, whether he meant it or because he hoped saying something—anything—could curb her distress, he wasn’t sure.

“Things will be back to normal by tomorrow,” she said, “Holiday Happenings is going to happen.”

This was said fiercely as if she was challenging him—or the gods—to disagree with her. He wasn’t going to, but the gods seemed to enjoy a challenge like that one.

It was Tess who took Emma’s mind off her weather woes. Apparently the baby was tired of looking at the embarrassment of riches around her, and tired of the adult chatter.

She began squealing and pointing at various cookies and nearly wiggled herself right out of Emma’s arms.

“WA DAT.”

“Want that?” Emma guessed, mercifully distracted. “She’s hungry.”

“Or could squeeze in a cookie after demolishing a ten-course meal,” he said, thanking Tess for evaporating the tears that had shone so briefly behind those eyes.

“Can she have one, daddy? Or does she have to have healthy stuff first?”

He frowned. Let it go? He wasn’t going to be here long enough for it to matter, was he? Correcting her meant revealing something more of the private life, fresh with tragedy, that he kept so guarded.

On the other hand, revealing the fact he was not Tess’s father seemed safer than returning to the possibility the weather could ruin her plans for Holiday Happenings.

If he never heard the words Holiday Happenings again, he would be just as happy. It was worth it, even if it revealed a little of himself.

He realized he had not introduced himself.

“I’m Ryder Richardson,” he said, not trying to disguise his reluctance, “I’m Tess’s uncle. Her guardian.”

“Oh.”

It asked questions, none of which he intended to answer. He stuck out his hand, a diversionary tactic to stall questions and to keep her mind off her failed evening.

She juggled the baby, and took his hand. As soon as he felt her hand in his, he knew he’d made a mistake. Her hand slipped inside his, a perfect fit, softness intermingled with surprising strength.

He felt the zing of the physical contact, steeled himself against it.

She felt something, too, because she froze for a moment, stared up into his eyes, blinked with startled awareness. And then she pulled her hand away, rapidly.

His eyes went to her lips. Once upon a time, a long time ago, when he was a different man in a different life, he had known other diversionary tactics. Most of them involved lips. His and hers.

Now as profoundly committed to taking his wandering mind off lips as he was to taking Emma’s mind off personal questions and the weather, he held out his arms, and Emma gave Tess back to him.

Babies were the grand diversion when it came to women. One look at Tess’s hair should take Emma’s mind irrevocably off her crushed hopes for the evening, and maybe off that sizzling moment of awareness that had just passed between them.

He propped Tess on the edge of the plank table, removed the blanket, pulled Tess’s little limbs from the car coat he’d had her in. Last he fumbled with the ridiculously hard-to-reach snap on the stupid snow hat that he had put on the baby out of a sense of wanting to do the responsible thing before they left on their road trip.

That was the worry part. A snow hat inside the car. In case. Well, that, and to cover the mess of her hair in case they stopped anywhere along the way. The cop might have even looked at him differently if he had spotted the baby’s hair.

If you can’t even look after her hair, how can you be trusted with the larger picture?

“I hate this hat,” he muttered, though what he really hated was that question.

“Why’s that?”

“It never seems to go on right.”

“Ah.” It was a strangled sound.

Ryder shot her a look. She was smiling, biting back a giggle.

He glared at her. He disliked merriment nearly as much as Christmas, especially when it was at his expense and made him feel self-conscious about his baby skills. “Is something funny?” he asked, annoyed.

She held up a finger, letting him know that soon she would be in control of herself. Really, she looked like an evil elf, gasping. The more she tried to stop laughing, the more she couldn’t, as if his disapproval was making her nervous. Which was good.

“You…have…it…on…backwards.”

He could look at it in a different way. Not that she was laughing at him, but that he’d succeeded. The sparkle of tears were gone from her eyes, replaced, that quickly, with the sparkle of laughter.

Only he hadn’t really succeeded. Because he could clearly see she didn’t look like an evil elf, after all. The laughter chased some shadow from her eyes, making them even prettier, and the smile made him even more aware of the sensuous lilt of those puffy lips.

He’d been here less than ten minutes, long enough to know he hated the White Christmas Inn and everything about it.

Ryder looked away from her, frowning. He stepped back from Tess and studied the hat. “I’ll be damned. It is on backwards. No wonder it was so hard to work with.”

A respected architect and he couldn’t get a hat on right. He was learning babies were an exercise in humility. Experimentally, he turned the headgear around the right way, admired it, allowed a small whisper of pleasure at this tiny discovery.

“It was the placement of the pom-pom that threw me,” he decided gravely.

“Of course,” she said, just as gravely.

“Now I won’t have to buy another hat,” he said, allowing that little whisper of pleasure to deepen.

He saw Emma’s look, and was astounded at how his pride was stung at her misinterpretation. “Not because I can’t afford another one,” he said sharply, “because you cannot imagine how terrible it is being the sole man shopping in the baby department.”

Tess was crankily trying to pull that hat back off.

“It doesn’t look like she likes hats, anyway,” Emma said.

“Until she lets me comb her hair, she wears hats.” He took the hat back off and stepped aside, letting Emma see for the first time what was underneath.

If she started laughing at him again, he was going to pick up the baby and head back into the storm, knock on the door of the first house in Willowbrook that had no Christmas decorations and beg for sanctuary from the storm.

But Emma didn’t laugh. Her gasp of dismay was almost worse.

Hey, it’s not as if your hair is all that different.

But Emma’s hair was different from Tess’s. Emma’s curls looked as if she had tried, maybe too vigorously, to tame them. He felt that inexplicable urge to touch again, focused on his niece’s hair instead.

Tess’s white blonde hair did not look as if it had been combed since the day she was born, even though it had only been two days. Her hair looked like it belonged to a monster baby.

It formed fuzzy dreadlocks and tortured corkscrews. There was a clump at the back that looked like it might house mice, and two distinct hair horns stood up on either side of her head.

“No nanny for the last two days,” he explained, feeling the deep sting of his own ineptitude. “And in Tess’s world, Uncle is not allowed to touch the goldilocks.”

Emma looked skeptical, as if he might be making up a story to explain away his own negligence.

“I know,” he said dryly. “It’s shameful. A twenty pound scrap of baby controlling a full grown man, but there you have it.”

Emma still looked skeptical, so he demonstrated. He reached out with one finger. He touched Tess’s hair, feather-light, barely a touch at all.

The baby inhaled a deep breath, and exhaled a blood-curdling shriek, as if he dropped a red-hot coal down her diaper. He removed his finger, the shriek stopped abruptly, like a sentence stopped in the middle. Tess regarded him with her most innocent look.

“Ha,” he said, moved his finger toward her, and away, shriek, stop, shriek, stop. Soon, he stopped as soon as her mouth opened wide, so she was making O’s and closing them, like a fish.

Emma snorted with laughter. Not that he wanted to get her laughing again or explore the intrigue of shadows that danced away when she laughed, and flitted back when she didn’t.

Again, he wondered what he was doing. He had not wanted Emma to cry. He wanted this even less. Firsts.

There was something tempting about being with someone who did not know his history, as if he could pretend to be a brand-new man. He contemplated that, being free, even for a moment a man unburdened, a man with no history.

But he wasn’t those things and Ryder hated himself for thinking he should be free of the mantle he carried. His brother had died because he was, quite simply, not enough.

The fact that Emma could tempt him to feel otherwise made him angry at her as well as at himself, as irrational as that might have been.

CHAPTER THREE

INSTEAD of moving toward the temptation, the pretense, of being a man he was not, Ryder mentally reshouldered his burdens, and stopped playing the little game with Tess, but not before he felt that small sigh of gratitude that his niece did bring some lightness into a world gone dark.

“Can she have a cookie?” Emma asked, coming back to her original question.

“I’ll try her with a little baby food first.” He dug through the bag, and a bottle dropped to the floor. He watched it roll downhill, another indicator the house was hiding some major problems.

Which were, he noted thankfully, none of his concern. He fetched the bottle back, and got out a jar, which he heated in the microwave for a few seconds.

But, of course, the baby food proved impossible, Tess wiggling around in the high chair Emma had unearthed and focused totally on the cookies that surrounded her. She swatted impatiently when he tried to deliver pureed carrots to her.

“Certified organic, too,” he said, finally quitting, wiping a splotch of carrot off his shirt. “She had a bottle in the car a while ago, so go ahead, give her a cookie.”

Unmindful that the baby was now covered in carrots, including some in the tangle of hair he was not allowed to touch, Emma swooped her up from the high chair.

“Which one, Tess?” Emma asked, stopping at each plate, letting his niece inspect.

Tess chose a huge gingerbread man, picked a jelly bean off his belly and gobbled it up.

“You must be hungry, too,” Emma said to him. “I can’t offer anything fancy. I have hot dogs for Holiday Happenings.”

No! After all his work at distraction, they were right back to this? The shadow in her eyes darkened every time she mentioned her weatherwaylaid event.

“If you’d like a glass of mulled wine or hot chocolate, I have several gallons of both at the warming shed.”

Several gallons of wine sounded terribly attractive.

An escape he did not allow himself. Tess needed better.

“A couple of hot dogs would be perfect.” He watched Tess polish off the jelly-bean buttons and take a mighty bite of her gingerbread man’s head. Disappointment registered on her face as she chewed.

“YUCK.” Without ceremony she spat out what was in her mouth, tossed the headless gingerbread man on the floor and reached for a different cookie.

Emma thought it was funny, but these were the challenges in his life. What was best for Tess? Was she too young to try and teach her manners? Did he just accept the fact she didn’t like the cookie and let it go? Or by doing nothing was he teaching her the lifelong habit of smashing cookies on the floor?

Serial smasher.

Ryder rubbed at his forehead. He could convince himself he did okay on the big things for Tess: providing a home, clothing, food, a lovely middleaged nanny who loved his niece to distraction. But it was always the little things, cookies and bonnets, that made him wonder what the hell he was doing.

People had the audacity to hint he needed a partner, a wife, a feminine influence for Tess, but to him the fact they suggested it only meant he had become successful at hiding how broken he was inside. What little he had left to give he was saving for Tess, and he hoped it would be enough.

Suddenly he felt too tired and too hungry even to think.

Or to defend himself against the thought that came.

That he was alone in the world. That all the burdens of the past and all the decisions about the future were his alone to carry and to make.

The warmth of the White Christmas Inn was creeping inside him, despite his efforts to keep it at bay, making him feel more alone.

Emma had said Christmas transformed everything and made it magic, and she had said there were spirits here who protected all who entered. But the last thing he needed was to be so tired and hungry that her whimsy could seep past the formidable wall of his defenses.